The present invention relates to fasteners molded from a synthetic resin in the form of a one-body assembly and, in use, individually successively severed and dispensed for anchoring tags or labels to various consumer goods such as clothing for example or for altogether bundling a plurality of articles.
As early as in 1963, U.S. Pat. No. 3,103,666 disclosed a first example of fastener assemblies of the sort mentioned, and since then, there has been proposed and put for an actual use a number of modified or improved fastener assemblies, including the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,733,657.
Plastic-made fasteners in reference are normally of such a small size as to be about 30 to 50 mm in length that if they are individually separately produced from the outset, their handling is greatly inconvenienced, so that they are manufactured in groups or assemblies, each in most cases comprising 30 to 50 fasteners or, in some other cases, 75 to 100 fasteners.
Thus, in the above referred-to U.S. Pat. No. 3,733,657 for example, a fastener assembly is provided, which has a structure as illustrated in FIG. 1 of the accompanying drawings: As shown, each fastener of the assembly comprises a head 1, a filament 2 connected at its one end to a central portion of a side end face of the head 1, and a crossbar 3 formed at the other end of the filament 2 and extending in a plane parallel to the plane in which the head 1 extends, and a plurality of such individual fasteners are altogether connected to their common connecting rod 21 through their respective connecting necks 20. In this fastener assembly, further, heads 1 of each adjacent fasteners are connected to each other through a joint member 22 capable of being easily cut so that otherwise likely tangling of a first fastener assembly and a second one can be prevented from occurring.
The connecting necks 20 are not only necessary for connecting individual fasteners to the connecting rod 21 but also functional as means to be engaged by a feeding member of a fastener dispensing machine when the fasteners of a fastener assembly loaded in the dispensing machine are individually successively delivered to the prescribed shooting position within the dispensing machine.
Then, the connecting rod 21 serves the function of, so to speak, a backbone on which to support a plurality of fasteners in an arrangement resembling the one in which teeth are formed in a comb. Besides, it is indispensable in that in the molding of a fastener assembly, it is formed as a matter of course in a mold channel through which a molten synthetic resin is supplied.
Thus, conventional fastener assemblies typically represented by the one disclosed in the above considered U.S. Pat. No. 3,733,657 indispensably have connecting necks and connecting rods. However, even although these are conventionally indispensable to the formation of a fastener assembly, the connecting necks and connecting rod are not indispensable constituents of fasteners per se, and in addition, they involve various disadvantages such as follows.
With an example of the fastener assembly made of nylon, having 35 member fasteners formed on a connecting rod through their respective connecting necks and weighing 98 g, the weight of the connecting rod and connecting necks amounts to 10.5 to 14.5 g, which equal to about 11 to about 15% of the total weight of the fastener assembly. To be particularly noted in this connection is that when fasteners are dispensed in attaching tags or labels to merchandise, the connecting necks and connecting rod are no longer of utility and are simply discarded as waste. Therefore, from an economical point of view, it is advantageous to provide a fastener assembly having no connecting necks, nor a connecting rod.
Also, with reference to FIG. 2 of the accompanying drawings, as more fasteners are dispensed by a fastener dispensing machine 23, the connecting rod 21 is increasingly projected downwardly through a guide groove provided in the fastener dispensing machine for therein receiving fastener assemblies one at a time, and on the projected portion of the connecting rod 21 there are projected a number of connecting necks 20 from which individual fasteners have been detached by cutting by a cutter blade mounted in the fastener dispensing machine. Those projecting connecting necks 20 on the connecting rod 21 have an acute tip end produced by cutting by the cutter blade, and when they catch at merchandise, particularly fabric-made goods for example, they are likely to damage the merchandise, therefore a great care should necessarily be taken in performing the fastener dispensing operation or it should necessarily be operated to cut away the connecting rod 21 frequently before it has not projected a great length through the guide groove.
Then, there has been an attempt made to connect each adjacent crossbars 3 and 3 at a point along the length thereof so as to obtain a fastener assembly with which the disadvantageous connecting necks and connecting rod are effectively disposed of. With the fastener assembly then produced, however, although the above indicated disadvantages due to the connecting necks and connecting rod can be effectively cancelled, a new difficulty ispresented such that since adjacent crossbars are joined together only at a point or, more specifically at a central point along the length thereof, they cannot maintain a constant relative position or they are allowed, during a normal handling of the fastener assembly, to undergo pivotal motion with the point of their joint as the center of the motion, resulting in that their joint becomes broken. Once the connection between adjacent crossbars is broken, member fasteners of the fastener assembly, having no connecting necks nor a connecting rod and connected altogether only through their crossbars, become individually severed, whereby it no longer is feasible to load the fastener assembly in a fastener dispensing machine and eventually the individually severed fasteners have to be discarded as waste.
Also with the fastener assembly in which member fasteners are altogether connected only through their crossbars, it is likely that when a portion of the fastener assembly is permitted to catch at an item of merchandise during shooting operation of fasteners by a fastener dispensing machine, the connection between crossbars 3 and 3 becomes unintentionally broken.